State Supreme Court Ruling Allows Police to Look Through Cell Phones

If you’re arrested in California, police can now inspect the contents of your cell phone without a warrant. Critics are calling the State Supreme Court ruling that allows cell phone inspections an invasion of privacy.

These days, cell phones contain a lot of personal information,
like text messages, e-mails, and even banking information.

Michael Vitiello is a professor at the McGeorge School of Law.
He says the ruling is based on a precedent that said police can
seize anything that might be harmful. If police were to arrest
someone for buying drugs, and they found the suspect had a
cigarette pack, they could find a razor blade inside. But Vitiello
says that's not the case with a cell phone.

"It's a pretty significant invasion of privacy that goes
beyond the original justification for the rule because if you
just take the person's phone away from them the person can't really
destroy any evidence in it and it can't really represent harm for
the officers."

Vitiello says he expects the case to go before the U-S Supreme
Court since other states have ruled differently in similar cases.
Just a few years ago the Ohio Supreme Court ruled that it was a
violation of defendants' rights to look through their cell
phones.